As threat, as abject, as subject, and as a combination of all three, the figure of the migrant and the figure of the refugee loom large in the ethical imagination. The recent surge in desperate efforts of people to leave their homelands for other places, the Syrian refugee crisis, the mass displacement of the Rohingya, the “caravan” of Central American migrants seeking to cross the US-Mexico border, and of course the surge in anti-immigrant, and anti-migrant discourses all speak to the moral urgency of collective responses to these figures. It is one of the most pressing concerns of our current moment. This roundtable seeks to examine the ways in which conceptions and configurations corporeality can and do inform ethical responses to migrants, immigrants, and refugees. We wish to consider ways in which such figures are reduced to bodies (as labor, as casualties of perilous sea crossings, as targets for illegal organ trade). But we also want to explore the ways that imagining migrants and refugees in corporeal terms might prove useful for the project of bringing about more ethical responses to these figures. Possible topics include representations of the migrant as laboring body; the migrant as corporeal abject; the migrant as animal; trade in migrant organs; migrants as crowds or corporeal collectivities. While we are particularly interested in papers that examine representations of migrants as corporeal entities in fiction and nonfiction narratives, we welcome papers that deal with other genres. We also seek papers that approach this topic from a range of perspectives.

Submit abstracts for this roundtable session here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17729

For more information about NEMLA 2019, visit http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html